As Neil Gaiman put it a few years ago, “I don’t really understand why the material of Love and Rockets isn’t widely regarded as one of the finest pieces of fiction of the last 35 years. Because it is.” The creator of the hit Marvel streaming show She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Jessica Gao, concurs: “Love and Rockets is my all-time favorite comic,” she tells me. “The core magic of the series is these characters who feel so real and complex. And after all these years, the quality has never dipped. Protect Los Bros at all costs!”
And yet, despite all this literary respectability, the Hernandez brothers have not become mainstream geek touchstones like Moore, Miller, or Gaiman. This seems fine with Los Bros, who still live the ethos of the punk rock they were obsessed with in their youth. Although they’ve done occasional mainstream work here and there, they have rarely worked for the so-called Big Two, Warner Bros.-owned DC Comics and Disney’s Marvel. Los Bros stay relentlessly in control of their own vision.
They have to be punks, because they’re in one of the country’s lowest-paying and most unforgiving creative industries. As 40th-anniversary celebrations ramp up, they can’t afford to stop. Lucky for them and their readers, Los Bros aren’t out of ideas just yet.
Love and Rockets’ origin story can be traced back to materfamilias Aurora Hernandez. When the boys got into comics as kids in Oxnard—an ailing manufacturing town with a huge Latinx population that leaders and governments rarely invested in—their stay-at-home mother, who would often be cold and distant, came to them with a revelation: She, too, used to read the funny books, and she still had her old ones: everything from Classics Illustrated to Superman. What’s more, she had been inspired to draw in her youth. “She would draw pictures from comics,” says the amiable Mario. “She would draw the covers just in pencil, and they were beautiful; really beautiful stuff.”
The brothers gobbled up this material, learning about the pioneers of the medium and their mother’s mind. Their father, Santos—a stoic man who worked long hours on the production line at a General Motors plant—would occasionally buy them comics in an effort at fatherly love. He died when they were young.
There were five kids in the household, four boys and a girl. Mario was the easygoing and diplomatic older sibling, Gilbert was serious-minded and more prone to stress, and the two had long conversations in the bedroom they shared. Jaime, on the other hand, was the quiet youngster, always eager to impress his elder brothers, especially Gilbert. “I idolized Gilbert,” Jaime says. “Whatever he liked, I liked.”
To this day, the three brothers are extensions of what they were as kids: Mario is a humble charmer, Gilbert is matter-of-fact and bristles at stupid questions, and Jaime just seems happy and awed that he gets to create.
Comics were only one obsession. The boys also fell in love with trashy horror and sci-fi movies; they would work themselves into an excited froth over the unrespectability and audacity of forgotten films like The Giant Gila Monster and Robot Monster. They discovered girls and started daydreaming about what might be going on in their heads.
Abraham Riesman
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